Tag: Bible

secrets between friends

[6 minutes]

Feast your eyes a moment on this surprising promise from the Psalms:

The friendship of the LORD is for those who fear him, and he makes known to them his covenant.

Psalm 25:14

I’m blessed with a close circle of friends. They know less about me than Sandy but far more than anyone else. They are trusted confidants and counselors; a few know my secret burdens and carry them in their hearts and into their prayer rooms. They know God, God knows them, and they know me.

The psalmist (David) had a friendship with God that would make any of us swoon. A man after God’s own heart, the Lord reminds us more than once. They shared secrets. God knew David’s best and worst moments and David was dialed in to God’s heart like no one else who ever lived. Abraham knew God as a close friend and Moses knew Yahweh face to face. But David was entwined with God’s very heart.

The word “friendship” in the above verse is weighty. In the original it suggests being in one’s inner circle. It describes a relationship in which one feels confident confiding in or telling closely guarded secrets to the other.

Wouldn’t it be something to be the person that God always finds in a crowded room? Picture this: you’re in a place that is buzzing with activity and suddenly He leans in and whispers something that lights up your soul. In a room full of people, you are the one he picks. How cool would that be?

I’m not talking about God playing favorites. It’s just that you’ve proven yourself to be trustworthy and loyal over time and He sees your sincerity. He taps into that. Just as the squeaky wheel gets the oil, the hungry heart gets the meal.

One of the proverbs says, “It’s the glory of God to conceal a matter, but the glory of kings to search out a matter.” This is what I’m getting at.

There are forty-eleven ways I could go with this, but I’m focusing on only one today: getting the people of God into the Word of God for the good of their souls and glory of God.

Instagram verses aren’t bad — at all. But they’re crumbs. I don’t mean that negatively, for they do serve a purpose. Bible memes should be used as appetizers for a bigger feast. What I’m talking about is spreading an open Bible on your lap and devouring portions of scripture until one of them spurs a thought that transcends normal ditties. Until God presses in and whispers something sacred into your spirit.

Here now, I’m not imploring us legalistically but rather lovingly. Treating God’s Word as an occasional snack will lead to spiritual emaciation and weakness. There is a famine in the church today and we’ll not fare well within this weird world until we become people whom God finds in a crowded, noisy room, pulls us into Himself, and instructs us.

Isaiah warned us about tromping through the minefields of life without proper intel. He offered a better way when he said,

And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way, walk in it,” when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.

Isaiah 30:20-21

Scripture are the very words of the Eternal God. Peter told Jesus the only thing keeping him hanging tough in a fluid world were the words with which the Savior shepherded him. Those jots and tittles were life to the wobbly disciple.

We wonder why we don’t get more out of our Bible reading. It’s awfully dry for our taste. Why isn’t the ink more wet?? Could it be that we aren’t approaching His Word with the desperateness and reverence of Peter? Where else will I find what’s true and real and living?

You’re not going to find it on the back of a cereal box or in a tweet. No celebrity preacher can fill the dearth in your soul. We may get crumbs but we’ll never get change.

Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart.

—Jeremiah 15:16

“A joy.” Yeah, that’s it. Let us go to the Word with that on our lips. Make your Word a joy to my heart today, Jesus. Tell me something I don’t know. Amen.

Christian people will attend conventions, plunge into all kinds of Christian work, read many good books about the Bible and Christian living; but they give the Bible itself the most cursory and superficial heed. And it is for this reason that the Bible does not speak to them.

If you would know all the wondrous beauty of a forest glade, you must not be satisfied with passing through it with hasty foot and in company with a troop of merry children whose ringing laughter carries panic into the hearts of thousands of shy living things that, with trembling hearts, keep still in hole and brake and nest. No, you must go alone and sit quietly down on the log of some felled tree and wait. Then the mystery of beauty will begin to unfold itself: the fairy bowers, the mossy glens, the interlacing boughs. Presently a note will sound from yonder bough, as the signal for the outburst of many sweet-voiced choristers, and the woodland will ring with the music of the birds while the squirrel runs up some neighboring tree, and the rabbits come out to feed, and the young foxes play about their holes.

All this is hidden from those who cannot wait. So there are mysteries of glory and beauty in Scripture hidden from the wise and prudent but revealed to babes. There is no book that will so repay time spent over its pages as the Word of God.

If the people who are now perpetually running about to meetings for crumbs of help and comfort, would only stay at home and search their Bibles, there would be more happiness in the Church and more blessing on the world.

– F. B. Meyer

That’s it for now. Hope it helps.

Selah, beloved.

the book that understands me

[7.5 minute read]

For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires.

Hebrews 4:12

Two men. One, a former president, fashioned a Bible to his own liking; the other, a French professor, tried to do that but was ultimately pierced through by its unconquerable swordplay and aliveness.

Thomas Jefferson thought the supernatural and miraculous works of Jesus were greatly exaggerated, so he took a razor to them in his New Testament. Once he had trimmed away all but the most core and basic teachings of Jesus, he sat back and sighed, satisfied with his compact version he named The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Jefferson Bible, is an 86-page dumbed-down testament of Enlightened Man. It disregards Jesus’s virgin birth, resurrection, and ascension, along with anything else that defied common sense and reason. Or so thought the 77-year old American statesman.

Across the sea, Émile Cailliet was born in Dampierre, France on December 17, 1894. He served in the French armed forces in World War I, and distinguished himself with many degrees from two universities. After coming to America, he served as a professor French literature at the University of Pennsylvania; Scripps College and Claremont Graduate School in California; and Wesleyan University in Connecticut. In 1960, he began to teach Christian philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary, in which capacity he continued until his death in 1983.

The following is his remarkable story (in his own words) of coming to faith through the supernatural appeal of the Word of God:

I was born in a small village of France and received an education that was naturalistic to the core. This could possibly have had a great deal to do with the fact that I did not even see a Bible before I reached the age of twenty-three.

To say that this naturalistically inspired education proved of little help through front-line experiences as a lad of twenty in World War I would amount to quite an understatement. When your own buddy – at the time speaking to you of his mother – dies standing in front of you, a bullet in his chest, what use is the sophistry of naturalism? Was there a meaning to it all?

One night a bullet got me, too. An American field ambulance crew saved my life and later the use of a badly shattered arm was restored. After a nine-month stay at the hospital, I was discharged and resumed graduate work.

During my stay at the American hospital, I had married a Scotch-Irish girl whom I had met in Germany on Christmas Eve the year before the war had broken out. She was, and has always remained, a deeply evangelical person. I am ashamed to confess that she must have been hurt to the very core of her being as I made it clear that religion would be taboo in our home. Little did I realize at the time that a militant attitude often betrays an inner turmoil.

I had returned to my books, but they were no longer the same books. Neither was my motivation the same motivation. Reading in literature and philosophy, I found myself probing in depth for meaning. During long night watches in the foxholes, I had in a strange way been longing – I must say it, however queer it may sound – for a book that would understand me.

But I knew of no such book. Now I would in secret prepare one for my own private use. And so, as I went on reading for my courses I would file passages that would speak to my condition, then carefully copy them in a leatherbound pocket book I would always carry with me. The quotations, which I numbered in red ink for easier reference, would mead me as it were from fear and anguish, through a variety of intervening stages, to supreme utterances of release and jubilation.

The day came when I put the finishing touch to “the book that would understand me,” speak to my condition, and help me through life’s happenings. A beautiful, sunny day it was. I went out, sat under a tree, and opened my precious anthology. As I went on reading, however, a growing disappointment came over me. Instead of speaking to my condition, the various passages reminded me of their context, of the circumstances of my labor over their selection.

Then I knew that the whole undertaking would not work, simply because it was of my own making. It carried no strength of persuasion. In a dejected mood, I put the little book back in my pocket.

At that very moment, my wife – who, incidentally, knew nothing of the project on which I had been working – appeared at the gate of the garden, pushing the baby carriage.

It had been a hot afternoon. She had followed the main boulevard only to find it too crowded. So she had turned to a side street which she could not name because we had only recently arrived in town. The cobblestones had shaken the carriage so badly that she had pondered what to do. Whereupon, having spotted a patch of grass beyond a small archway, she had gone in with the baby for a period of rest.

It turned out that the patch of grass led to an outside stone staircase which she had climbed without quite realizing what she was doing. At the top, she had seen a long room, door wide open. So she entered.

At the further end, a white-haired gentleman worked at a desk. He had not become aware of her presence. Looking around, she noticed the carving of a cross. Thus she suddenly realized that this office was a part of a church building – of a Huguenot church edifice hidden away as they all are, even long after the danger of persecution has passed. The venerable-looking gentleman was the pastor.

She walked to his desk and heard herself say, “Have you a Bible in French?”

He smiled and handed over to her a copy, which she eagerly took from his hand; then she walked out with a mixed feeling of both joy and guilt.

As she now stood in front of me, she meant to apologize, but I was no longer listening to her.

“A Bible, you say? Where is it? Show me. I have never seen one before!”

She complied. I literally grabbed the book and rush to my study with it. I opened and “chanced” upon the Beatitudes! I read, and read, and read – now aloud with an indescribable warmth surging within. I could not find words to express my awe and wonder. And suddenly the realization dawned upon me: this was the book that would understand me!

I continued to read deeply into the night, mostly from the Gospels. And lo and behold, as I looked through them, the One of whom they spoke, the One who spoke and acted in them became alive to me.

The providential circumstances amid which the book had found me now made it clear that while it seemed absurd to speak of a book understanding a man, this could be said of the Bible because its pages were animated by the presence of the living God and the power of his mighty acts. To this God I prayed that night, and the God who answered was the same God of whom it was spoken in the book.

(Eternity magazine, July 1974).

The Book of books is alive and powerful. It doesn’t just “understand us,” it enlightens and enlivens us to know God intimately and equips us to thrive in this hard, unyielding world. As H.B. Charles, Jr. put it so well, “It is the will of God to have the Spirit of God use the Word of God to make the children of God look like the Son of God.”

May his Word accomplish its perfect work in you and me today.

Selah, beloved.

Word Of God, Speak…

I'll be posting Part 3 of my 'Hearing God' dialogue with John later today, but I wanted to contribute this piece to further punctuate the ethos of this vital conversation. Photo courtesy: audioholics.com
I’ll be posting Part 3 of my ‘Hearing God’ dialogue with John later today, but I wanted to contribute this piece to further punctuate the ethos of this vital conversation.
Photo courtesy: audioholics.com

And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way, walk in it…”

(Isaiah 30:21)

*     *     *     *

That verse is lifted from a scriptural context forecasting the future operation of the Holy Spirit with His people. It’s not solely for apostolic times, it’s not only for Israel, and it’s not a sweet-by-and-by promise.

The day is coming, Isaiah prophesies, when there won’t be need for an earthly high priest to give guidance to the nation of God, for all will become priests by proxy of Christ’s ministry in the Church; while there will be prophets and teachers, like Isaiah, we each will have an anointing to hear from God for ourselves (see 1 John 2:27, you know, the one that tells us we will not have need of a teacher for each of us are given grace to hear and understand supernaturally).

Thank God for the Bible! 

Oh, what a blessed people we are to have a divinely preserved, living, breathing archive of God’s Eternal Story, will and mandate. I’m in a coffee shop right now sitting two tables away from a couple of dudes, each poring over copies of His written testaments to His people. How thrilling it is to see it in the public marketplace!

I, for one, would not enjoy the fellowship and intimate communion of Christ without His Holy Word, nor would I dare venture in ANY direction of my life without digging into His Words of Life found therein, to find my marching orders. I puzzle at those who cannot pick up any signals from glorified airwaves whenever they open the Bible. It’s a rare thing when I don’t hear clearly enough the whispers of the Holy when the scriptures are opened before my eyes.

The Bible has always been – and continues to be – my primary mode of hearing God, but – and I’m being careful here – it’s not my only means of hearing God. Sure, there are heralds who stand in Sunday pulpits and declare “thus says the Lord” to the congregation and God speaks vibrantly through them to His people: you are loved, you need to repent, learn to trust Me, lay it down, etc.

Yes, that. Certainly.

Or through counselors and wise spiritual mothers and fathers – surely these too. But I’m speaking about Something wholly and reverentially Other.

Driven To Hear

I’ve shared on this before but it begs notice once again. A few years ago, I was struggling. The pastorate had squeezed every ounce of moisture from my bones and I was parched to the soul. My personal prayer closet was getting cobwebs and the Word was little more than a polite guest in my life.

I needed a Word.

Something. Anything.

Word of God, speak…

So I drove an hour away to find a quiet out-of-the-way niche (a custom of mine) to be silent and expectant before my Shepherd. My agenda was simple. I only had one question on my heart and I asked it, then sat still as a stone (easier when you’re a paraplegic) and waited.

“Father, how do You feel about me?”

It was bold, sassy and desperate, but there it was in all its glory. I drove miles and spent gasoline to ask a question framed in seven words.

But you know what? In that holy ground spot I got not one, but two responses. Each came after a period of silence for a half-hour to an hour and then within mere minutes of each other.

The first:

“I’m jealous for you.”

And then:

“I’m protective of you.”

So this mercifully became how my relationship with God was defined in that moment – and since.  It wasn’t audible. There was no golden hue and ethereal mist. No background choir. It just…was…in all its simple eloquence. I ‘heard’ my Father’s voice and those words were nowhere in my inner thesaurus at the time. Truth to tell, I had been expecting something quite different.

Did this message(s) conflict – in any way – with the written Word? Of course not. Were they the demented ramblings of the enemy? I won’t even dignify that with an answer.

Could it have been self-talk? I’ll allow that there are times that happens, but why dismiss out of hand the likelihood that my Father wants me to know these things – especially when my self-talk in that particular puddle of pity sounded more retributive and doubtful?

It was God. Speaking. To me. In the ‘now’.

I’ve heard that familiar voice many times in my life, mostly in the Word (even then it sounds like added commentary), but also in the gentle whisperings of a Friend at my shoulder.

Hard Of Hearing?

It’s telling that the final book of scriptural canon – which is more than its coda – is our book for our time because we are the people of the Book of Revelation. We are the people of the last days. And in this ‘right now’ book we find the phrase “he who has ears to hear…” an amazing SIXTEEN times! Hearing, it would seem, is quite crucial for the people of the last days.

Consider for a moment the convoluted, thorny, complicated issues of our day: the LGBTQ question – can someone be a Christian and be gay? What if they are gay but celibate? What of the quandary of gay marriage? If I assent to it, will I be contributing to the demise of the Gospel, much less the unraveling of the social  fabric of our times? Will there be judgment because I was unfaithful to my post or will I be chastised by Jesus for being unloving?

What of taking up arms against our brothers to protect my family? Or joining the growing wave of unrest against those who are charged with enforcing the law? Who do I stand with? Is there a time when abortion is necessary? Is what that mega-church guy (whom everyone and their mother is running after) touting really biblical?

Certainly where the Bible offers black and white answers we should hitch our wagons, but where it is gray? Or silent?

Adam’s Apple

The times are becoming more deceptive and the trilling voices seem so convincing; the news markets manipulate us into seeing only what they want us to see. Church celebrities, seduced by popular culture, offer their sage guidance but how do we know it isn’t bereft of the Holy Spirit’s endorsement?

We are Adam and Eve all over again, munching on the fruit of the Wrong Tree, using logic and sirens of the times to influence our choices.

And parents? We’re doing a sorry job of teaching our kids how to seek and wait on the Voice for their instruction. When do we ever tell them, “Go spend time alone with God on the matter. What does He say?” Instead we ask, which job pays the most? What uses the least gas? Which apartment is closer to work? What school has the best scholastics?

You know, stuff Adam would ask first.

We say we are people of the Book, people who value His Word, but how does that truly show up in our daily routine?

Peter and the Eleven (well 10 anyway) said it would be unthinkable for them to depart from Jesus and make it out there on their own. Jesus’ words were life to them. Jesus said and did nothing unless He was prompted by His Father’s voice. Was this only to fix His status as the Son of God? No, He was showing us how to live every moment by being the Son of MAN – living in utter dependence and total sensitivity to the word of His Father.

Look how equipped He’s left us to hear God! We have the Written Record, the Solid Standard and Faithful Plumbline, the indwelling Holy Spirit, wise and holy counselors – and that Voice that breathes into our ear canal – no, not those silly protuberances on the sides of our heads, but the inner ears belonging to spiritual sons and daughters of the Lord.

How can we not hear?

Only by this: if we have ears to hear but choose not to listen.

God help us, in these desperate times, to be people who read – and listen – for the Voice to tell us “this is the way, walk ye in it.”

Amen.